Urban Emancipation: Popular Politics in Reconstruction Mobile, 1860-1890.

By Michael W. Fitzgerald. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002. Pp. [xviii], 301. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 0-8071-2837-6; cloth, $67.50, ISBN 0-8071-2807-4.)

The theme of Michael W. Fitzgerald's study of Mobile's "grassroots activists" is the "centrality of African American internal divisions for understanding... Reconstruction" (pp. 7, 9). Mobile, a seaport city, had a unique political and racial history: free Afro-Creoles played an elite role in the city, and northern Democrat Stephen A. Douglas had carried its votes in 1860. The city's reaction to President Andrew Johnson's lenient plan of Reconstruction was predictable with regard to the social control of thousands of freedmen (with the military's aid) and other issues involving the Freedmen's Bureau, northern missionaries, and black benevolent societies. Fitzgerald identifies the activists and their emerging factions, beginning with the black newspaper, the Nationalist (which had a white editor), with its support for qualified black teachers and opposition to chain gangs and "whites only" street cars.

With Military Reconstruction in 1867, blacks quickly demanded change; preventing violence, however, "became the obsession of moderate Republican leaders" (p. 95). After a minor riot, a Uniouist mayor was chosen by the military, and he quickly hired black street laborers and policemen and was easily elected by newly enfranchised black voters. Mobile's black leadership continued to routinely promote educated white allies, preferably northerners, for higher office. Upon Alabama's readmission in 1868, the newly elected Republican governor chose a mayor and council that split the black electorate. A bitter battle ensued in which moderate blacks had the mayor removed and the governor appointed blacks, for the first time, to the city boards. They and the white Republicans were in control, and city offices were shared racially.

Economic issues now loomed large, especially railroad subsidies. In 1869 the Nationalist ceased publication just as the governor appointed a new mayor and city boards. The new mayor, a Radical Republican, also favored railroad subsidies. The city quickly reaffirmed the railroad grant, the police budget was increased, and blacks were allowed, finally, inside streetcars. Bribery and fraud charges proliferated. In 1870 the Democrats won the state governorship, and the entire Democratic ticket won in Mobile, thus "ending the era of direct black political influence" in the city (p. 158). Although the city was insolvent, the board of trade recommended a million-dollar grant for yet another railroad project. Hence, Fitzgerald argues that "Mobile's fiscal ruin was a bipartisan, interracial community project" (p. 162).

Customhouse politics dominated bitter Republican patronage battles for federal jobs during the 1870s, and blacks, primarily Afro-Creoles, were often the beneficiaries. The public also rebelled against various economic scandals, and Mobile lost its charter from 1879 until 1887. Independent "parties" defeated the Democratic regulars, often with black support, as did a "Citizens" party in the mid-1880s. The brutal "Jim Crow" era began in the next decade.

Fitzgerald uses seventeen theses/dissertations, numerous articles from regional historical journals, newspapers, and his own previous publications (including two articles in the JSH) to make his case--and he does. However, his use of local election data is limited, as are his citations to national Reconstruction historiography. As is often the case, several items listed in the bibliography are not actually cited in the notes, although of course they may have been useful to the author.

JOHN KENT FOLMAR

California University of Pennsylvania